Thursday book report: Mrs. Armitage on Wheels

I love picture books.  Someone once told me my inner child is not very inner.  My outer adult, however, appreciates the fact that what we as a culture write for our children cuts to the heart of things.  So, with that in mind, I offer this report on a picture book dear to my heart, Quentin Blake’s Mrs. Armitage on Wheels.  And yes, this is more or less a fitness book, by my own quirky definition.

Mrs. Armitage loves to ride her bike.  However, she finds her bike lacking some important amenities.  One thing leads to another, until, in her enthusiasm, she creates a monster of a mess.  Undaunted, she moves along to the next challenge.  That is one of Mrs. Armitage’s best traits—boundless enthusiasm.

The book provides an example of an older person leading an active life—may I be as powerful at her age!

Further, in a funny way, she illustrates the problem some of us have when we get into something new.  We collect more and more stuff for our activity and lose the essence of why we were doing it in the first place.

Quentin Blake both wrote and illustrated this book.  His illustration style may be familiar to fans of Roald Dahl.  He has written other books about Mrs. Armitage, which are also delightful.

Should you feel the need for story time, check it out.  Or come over and I’ll read it to you, with sound effects.  (Ask my kids…)

Public Service Announcement (with guitar?)

Go outside and play.  This is useful advice both for fitness and for general wellbeing. 

The index of my brain is not working today, so I don’t remember and couldn’t locate the place where I read that an increased sense of depth perception can trigger a sense of wonder (William James?  Charlie Tart?  Carlos Castaneda?  One of those altered states kind of guys…), so you will have to take my word for it that someone did the research.  Point is:  go outside and look up; it will make you happier.  If you happen to be breathing hard at the time, so much the better.

It’s a lovely day.  Your bike is calling.

Obviously, should have posted yesterday...

At breakfast, Syd, my older son, mentioned that Seneca had something to say about the value of stating the obvious.  Since I state the obvious all day long, I thought I should look up the actual quote, which is:

People say, “What good does it do to point out the obvious?” A great deal of good; for we sometimes know facts without paying attention to them. Advice is not teaching; it merely engages the attention and rouses us, and concentrates the memory, and keeps it from losing grip. We miss much that is set before our very eyes. Advice is, in fact, a sort of exhortation. The mind often tries not to notice even that which lies before our eyes; we must therefore force upon it the knowledge of things that are perfectly well known.’

Seneca Ep. 94.25–26

Much of what needs to be done for fitness is “obvious.”  We know.  We just need to be reminded and encouraged to do it.

Go do what needs doing!  (And maybe not just in a fitness context!)

(This is a photo of a more fit-looking Greek statue, stolen fair and square and displayed in the British Museum.)

Friday exercise on Monday: Curls

(So this was supposed to be Friday’s post, but I was traveling.  It will still work today!)

The lovely Stickie, my exercise model, so named because of her svelte figure and her existence on a series of post-it notes, is demonstrating how to do a curl.  Curls are an excellent exercise for biceps, but I also like to use them to check out postural issues.

To begin, you need to stand up with good posture.  As you know, this means that your ears line up with your shoulders, hips, knees, and ankles.  Your abs are engaged (of course!).  It is good to check yourself out from the side in a mirror while doing this exercise to ensure that everything stays aligned.

As you exhale, you lift the dumbbells from your sides up to your shoulders.  While this sounds simple enough, your body may not agree.  It tends to cheat by letting the elbows slide back behind your torso or out to the sides.  It likes to recruit other muscles to help the biceps, resulting in a torso that sways backwards and forwards.  Also, if you choose a weight that is heavier than optimal, you will find that your shoulder will creep forward (in trainer-speak, you will find your humeral head is no longer centered in the socket), which strains all the nice little muscles that stabilize your shoulder joint.

As you inhale, you lower the weights back down to your sides, resisting gravity the whole way to maintain control of the weights.  I know it is tempting to let the weights just fall back down, but you build a lot of strength controlling that descent.

Have fun!

Thursday book report: Dynamic Alignment Through Imagery

Eric Franklin’s Dynamic Alignment Through Imagery was like marriage counseling for my body and mind.  Before I read the book, my body and mind lived together pretty amicably, but had some communication issues that made each of them unhappy.  What the book provided was a bridge between the two.

I love words (ya think?) and metaphors and the like.  My body doesn’t always know what to do with words, preferring pictures.  Imagery satisfies both.  Franklin explores the images we have all heard at different times at the gym—imagine you are suspended from the top of your head, for example—but he also gives many, many more.  Imagining one’s pelvis floating on balloons might not work for everyone, but it did keep mine from sinking down into a slouch.

Lots of different kinds of images fill the book, along with a basic introduction to the anatomical structures.  If you want a better understanding of how everything fits together and you are interested in visualizing different ways to make your body work, this book is for you.

I will add one disclaimer.  If you do not like floaty hippie kinds of language, you might want to stick to the anatomically based images, lest you find yourself annoyed with envisioning your breast bone as a flashlight and the like.

The really heavy stuff

I believe in lifting weights, but I draw the line at imaginary ones.  Let’s heft the real dumbbells in front of us, not the ones made of guilt or regret or whatever intangible but psychically heavy stuff.

Step in to the gym with me as a brand new person, created just this very minute.  Your ten-year-old self who could run for hours doesn’t exist.  Neither does your eighteen-year-old bathing beauty or your twenty-year-old running back, unless you are eighteen or twenty right now.  Even your last-year 50-pound-overweight self is gone, replaced by you, here, now.

The best workout you can do is the one that fully exhausts the body you inhabit today.  Some days, that body is stronger than others.  Some days, that body has a cold.  Some days, it’s a good idea to take out aggression on the weights instead of other targets; besides, the dog who sometimes has trouble distinguishing inside from outside doesn’t weigh very much.

Often, it turns out that dropping the psychic weights opens up the ability to lift the real ones.

Learning to learn

Teachers come in lots of different flavors, although most of them will not let you lick them to figure out what flavor they are.  This is a good thing because we learners also come in lots of flavors.  (You can pause here to lick your arm to detect your own flavor if you like.)  Some teachers are peanut butter to our chocolate, lox to our cream cheese, rosemary to our roast potatoes.  What we need to know comes flowing out of those teachers in ways that we can easily absorb.  The challenges become manageable with their help.

Then there are the kind of teachers who are cheddar to our peppermint, pickles to our fruit salad, or ice cream on our steak.  We can still learn from that second kind.  And, no, I don’t mean how to avoid them, although that is definitely a useful skill.  We can learn, by managing our attitudes, how to translate a totally foreign language into something we can understand.

While I was away on vacation, my son T.R. and I took a ski lesson together because we both want to improve.  Our instructor was blunt.  T. does better with a more encouraging style of teaching.  He heard that he was less competent than he thought he was and took that to mean that he was less competent than he really is.  It took a couple of days for him to process what the instructor said into something he could use, and even then he did better at applying what the instructor told me to do.  He made the best of a less than ideal situation.  And next time I would choose a different instructor for him.

For me, the bluntness worked.  Sure, my ego hurt a bit, but I came to the lesson knowing that I needed to learn and that I was not able to figure that out by myself.  Bluntness saves time.

My point, and yes, there is one in there somewhere, is that we, as learners have the responsibility to find the lessons.  When I am wearing my instructor/trainer/teacher hat, I try to make those lessons fun and accessible.  I do that by remembering that I am a learner, too.